Eve Arnold Quotes

On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

It ain't the picture and it ain't the camera - it's the operator.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

I've always preferred being behind the camera.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

I love photography and art-directing is something that I really would enjoy to do.

The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

Emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer's concept.

I like to work my camera as if it were a musical instrument.

No matter how many helicopters there are, when it comes down to it there is the camera and you.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

I am kept awake by the list of possibilities for shooting more photos and deciding what I must prioritise next.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Sometimes you feel uncomfortable taking a photograph, but that's all part of the job.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.